Blog

The 301 Redirect
The best way to redirect those pages is by using something called a “301 Redirect”. What this 301 redirect does, is it blatantly redirects to a different page when it is triggered, what makes the 301 redirect the best, is that not only does it accomplish your redirect, it does it safely, no having to worry about the search engines penalizing you for it! To be specific, the 301 redirect tells the browser, or in other cases, it tells the search engines “Hey this page has been moved, here is the correct URL!”. Think of it as you getting mail that is not addressed to your name, possibly addressed to somebody who has lived there prior to yourself, what do you do? You tell the post man (or woman) “Hey they dont live here anymore, here is the correct address”. It is the same concept guys, pretty simple if you asked me!
So lets get started. Below you will see several methods of using the 301 redirect, including the redirect in PHP, the redirect in ASP, the redirect in ASP .NET, the redirect in JSP (JAVA), the redirect in IIS, the redirect in ColdFusion, the redirect in CGI/PERL and finally the one I find most useful, the redirect using htaccess. Also showing other useful ways of using the 301 redirect with mod_rewrite!

HTML Redirection
How do you redirect using html you ask? Here is how: DONT!
Over the past 4-6 years, use of meta tag refresh redirection has been abused for uses in relation to SPAM. The result of this and other scenarios of mis-uses of it, is that when using it, that page WILL be de-indexed from every search engine.
NOTE: This also applies to javascript redirection. Search engines can easily detect javascript and meta tag redirection, so just dont do it, use the 301 redirect.
301 Redirect Using htaccess
Using htaccess to accomplish the 301 redirect is highly suggested due to it being fairly convenient to manage, rather than setting redirects on each individual page, you can simply add the redirect code to the .htaccess file.
Here is how to do it:
Create a file on the root directory of your website, name it “.htaccess”.
Open the .htaccess file using notepad or what ever text editor that you prefer.
Add this into the .htaccess file, save it and then upload it to your web server: PLAIN TEXT
CODE:
Redirect 301 /old/old.html
NOTE: Don’t add “http://www” to the first part of the statement – place the path from the top level of your site to the page. Also ensure that you leave a single space between these elements:
redirect 301 (the instruction that the page has moved) /old/old.html (the original folder path and file name) (new path and file name)
Also note that you are not required to redirect the page to another domain, an equally useful purpose for using the 301 redirect, is redirecting old pages to the new pages on the same domain, it all works the same way!
301 Redirect Using Mod_Rewrite

Mod_Rewrite has got to be one of the most usefull modules a server can have in terms of SEO, it allows to organize the file structure of your web site in a dynamic yet simple fashion, in this example I show a useful method of 301 redirecting with mod_rewrite.
When somebody links to your website, sometimes they dont always link to you in the way that you want them to. If somebody links to www.yoursite.com and somebody else links to yoursite.com, Google will assign a separate pagerank for each of those. Yes, it is stupid but it is true, by inserting the below example into your .htaccess file, it will solve the problem by redirecting anything linking to yoursite.com to www.yoursite.com, also redirecting the pagerank, so no worries!
PLAIN TEXT
CODE:
RewriteEngine On
rewritecond %{http_host} ^yoursite.com
rewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
301 Redirect Using IIS
In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect.
Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”.
Enter the page that the page will be redirected to.
Check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”.
Click on ‘Apply’.
301 Redirect Using ColdFusion

As well as many server side scripting languages, using the 301 redirect in them is fairly simple.
Simply add this code to your ColdFusion page:
PLAIN TEXT
CODE:
301 Redirect Using PHP
Simply add this code to your page or script:
PLAIN TEXT
PHP:

301 Redirect Using CGI/PERL
Simply add this code to your cgi/perl script:
PLAIN TEXT
PERL:
$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect(” http://www.new-url.com/ “);301 Redirect Using Ruby/Ruby on Rails
(Thanks to Codeninja) Simply add this code to your ruby/ruby on rails script:
PLAIN TEXT
RUBY:
def old_action
headers[“Status”] = “301 Moved Permanently”
redirect_to “http://www.mynewpageorsite.com/”
end
Pleaee note that all of the snippets of code above are examples and each were tested by me at some point. However, I am in no way responsible for any damage the code may cause, you use this code at your own risk.http://www.stevenhargrove.com/redirect-web-pages/